Mr. Beluncle

V.S. Pritchett's Mr. Beluncle is a pater familias running emotional roughshod on his employees and his household alike in their London suburb. His three stifled sons invariably cry after speaking to him, and his wife fumes at his stubbornness and the hint he may be carrying on an affair with his partner in the Bulux furniture firm, Mrs. Truslove. We might be in Ivy Compton-Burnett territory, but whereas Compton-Burnett emphasized the tragedy of such typically British household situations in her novels, Pritchett plays his Beluncle household for its social comedic aspects, casting all the characters as mostly consenting to their household (and office) dialectics of master and slave, and often winning their own back from their genial petty tyrant. MR. BELUNCLE is a masterful if eccentric Condition of England novel written at midcentury, with the Beluncles standing in for their own beleagured nation in its imperial and industrial decline. Mr. Beluncle, with his always vaguely distressed finances and his fondness for crackpot religions (and for fantasizing about suburban villas he will never be able to afford) seems to crystallize the kind of tumbledown nation V. S. Pritchett lived in after the finish of the Second World War. The prose style is often quite difficult, and often seems to show a debt from Henry Green (who like Pritchett is also the subject of a recent biography by Jeremy Treglown), but like Green it is also richly rewarding and quite funny. This re-issue from Modern Library comes with an intriguing introduction by Neil Strauss, which (like the novel itself) is sometimes maddening and sophomoric but simultaneously illuminating overall.